Barrington Walker

Education

Ph.D. University of Toronto, 2003 M.A. University of Toronto, 1994 B.A. York University, 1993

About

Barrington Walker is an historian of Modern Canada who focuses on the histories of Blacks, race immigration and the law. His work seeks to illuminate the contours of Canadian modernity by exploring Canada's emergence as racial state through its histories of white supremacy, slavery, colonization/immigration, segregation and Jim Crowism. Much of his work considers how these practices were legitimized, and in some instances contested, by the rule of law and legal institutions. He is the author of Race On Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario's Criminal Courts (University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2010) which was shortlisted for the Ontario Legislature Speaker's Book Award for 2012. He has also edited two collections: The African Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays (University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2012) and The History of Immigration and Racism in Canada: Essential Readings (Canadian Scholars Press, 2008).

He is currently working on two new books. Colonizing Nation: A Canadian History of Race and Immigration is under contract with Oxford University Press and due for publication in 2014. Dark Peril: Blacks and the Social Order in North America's Urban Landscape, 1992-2012 is the second book project. Dark Peril is a study of four case histories of Blacks' encounters with violence, state power and the law in North American cities. It is a long epilogue to many of the themes and arguments originally developed in Race On Trial but builds upon them to consider the historical violence that created Black modernity from slavery to its "afterlife"- to quote Saidiya Hartman- in the North American neoliberal carceral city of the turn- of- the- twenty-first century.

Courses Taught

Undergraduate

History 324 Race and Immigration in Canada History 425 The Black Canadian Experience History 258 Slavery in North America from the Colonial Era to 1865